Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 18, 1995 TAG: 9502200010
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
I'm going to do what the Spirit says do.
If the Spirit says die, I'm going to die, oh Lord.
As they marched against racism along the oft-bloodied highways around Selma, Ala., in the mid-1960s, Jonathan Daniels and other civil rights workers would sing those words.
"I don't think it ever occurred to him that he would die that way," said the Rev. Judith Upham, who met Daniels at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. "I think that he had a long-standing habit of doing what was right."
It was Daniels' conviction that led him to step in front of a shotgun blast intended for a black teen-ager named Ruby Sales on Aug. 20, 1965.
"Jon believed there were things worth dying for," Upham said.
This week, nearly three decades after Daniels' death, the school where he received his undergraduate degree paid tribute to him as part of a black history celebration.
Sales, Upham and others who had worked with Daniels gathered at Virginia Military Institute to remember him and the civil rights movement.
The questions were few as they visited some classrooms; their audience was too young to remember the struggle from which the visitors came.
"God requires us to be faithful to the cause until death," said John Jackson, a former civil rights activist who now is mayor of White Hall, Ala. "Jonathan Daniels laid down his life for the cause."
Those who knew him best said Daniels seemed to sense that his life might be cut short.
"He knew that death could come early," said William T. Braithwaite, a fellow cadet from the Class of 1961. "He didn't spend a lot of time talking about trivial things."
Around the VMI barracks, Daniels was known for a penetrating intellect that delved deeply into issues. His classmates voted him valedictorian.
"He was an intense person who had strong beliefs," said Lee Badgett, a classmate and Rhodes Scholar who is provost and dean of faculty at VMI. "He was a quiet person who engendered respect."
Upham, who met Daniels in 1964, remembered him as a young man with a "beautiful smile" and "shiny shoes," a holdover from his VMI training.
In March 1965, she remembered watching televised accounts of violence surrounding civil rights marches in Selma. When Martin Luther King put out a call for help, Daniels decided to go.
For the next several months, Upham and Daniels traveled around Selma, documenting the poverty with photographs and rallying fellow clergy to the cause.
"We believed that God was on the side of the poor and oppressed," Upham said.
They were followed constantly as Daniels drove his Volkswagen along the highways around Selma.
As summer approached, Upham had to leave for St. Louis. Daniels stayed behind.
A week before Daniels died, he and other demonstrators were thrown in jail. Once released, they went to The Cash Store, one of the few places that would serve blacks and whites together.
Tom Coleman, a 52-year-old man who identified himself as a part-time deputy sheriff, came into the store with a shotgun.
Daniels, Sales, Richard Morrisroe and another woman were inside.
"This store is closed," Coleman told them. "If you're black, get off this property. I'm going to blow your brains out."
Coleman lowered the gun toward Sales, and Daniels pushed her out of the way. A blast of buckshot hit him flush in the chest.
Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, was shot in the lower back by a second blast. He still has difficulty walking.
"I feel Tom Coleman's presence in my bones daily," he said.
An all-white jury cleared Coleman of killing Daniels.
Jackson said he takes heart that Coleman, now 84, has lived long enough to see the changes that he so violently resisted. Now, blacks hold key positions in the area.
Sales, who now attends the Episcopal seminary, said she still is trying to work through the trauma that Daniels' death created. The shock of the shooting left her unable to speak for two months.
She urged the students not to suffer in silence when things around them go wrong.
"If you don't speak, we become morally flaccid and lazy," she said. "We can't keep on just incarcerating people. We will face a whirlwind of anger like we have never seen. We've got to be careful what we are breeding."
Sales challenged the students to remember those, including Daniels, who have given their lives for their beliefs.
And now, she says, it is time for the torch of social consciousness to be passed on.
"Our time is past," she said. "It is up to the young to frame the questions."
"Whether we want to face it or not, we are facing a generation that will be very angry once they overcome the numbness. It's about numbing a passion for life. It's about the death of the spirit."
by CNB